A play instead of a play
Hans Keller
Mary Barnes (Royal Court) When Mary Barnes entered Kingsley Hall she was an undistinguished, unknown, unhappy nurse. When she left, five years later, she was a woman miraculously cured of madness, a gifted painter, a celebrity well on her way toward fame as a goddess in the Church of Anti-Psychiatry. It does not surprise me that she felt better.
Thus Thomas Szasz three years ago (in Schizophrenia: The Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry, New York, 1976 — a book not yet available in this country). The prognostic value of his diagnosis is now becoming apparent. Last week, Patti Love, the persuasive heroine in David Edgar's play, was asked on Radio 4 how Mary Barnes was nowadays, whether she was still well. And how! After all, she had had those exhibitions, had her book published, and now there was this play — which is, in fact, a theatrical arrangement of the book: dramatisation would be too strong a word. The book is Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness, by her and Joseph Berke, her Laingian psychotherapist. The anti-psychiatric canonization of the ex-nurse and near-nun is making steady progress: the Royal Court was sold out last week.
The radio interviewer instinctively knew regression's straightest way — as the crow flies across the hills and peaks of human achievement: as Miss Love was so impressed by Mary Barnes's 'playing out her real feelings', her rebirth, her becoming another person at the far end of her breakdown, had she herself ever done anything 'eccentric'? And how. Once, on a crowded bus, she had screamed like mad. It was an unhappy time in her life. She was sitting upstairs, and the conductor came to collect her fare, so she screamed. When she found herself in the street, she looked up at all those faces staring at her — at which point in her narration Miss Love broke into meticulously uncontrolled laughter, the kind of amplified giggles of which you and I, unreborn as we have remained, would be ashamed, incapable. The aesthetic sanctification of infantilism is making unobtrusive progress.
In fact, the playwright seems to have proved in the past that he knows, when he's on to a trendy thing, otherwise known as committed art — which, however, only succeeds, transcends on the highest level of genius, that of Beethoven's Ninth or Schoenberg's Survivor from Warsaw. In the valleys below, even on the hills, it's corn mitted alright — but for that very reason, it never gets as far as art. Mr Edgar will say, of course, that he didn't have art in mind, except Mary Barnes's. I see what he means, or rather, I don't: What did he have in mind? A documentary about a documentary? An instrumentation? But that would be alleged art again.
To be sure, he knows his sound effects; 'sense effects' would be too strong a neologistic concept. End of one scene: 'She that takes upon herself the shit of the whole world.' End of another: 'Give me your tit. You are my mother, Mary."Yes, I am your Mother Mary.' Nor, for that matter, is that excremental coda all that metaphorical: we had been regaled with the naked Mary Barnes, clad only in the contents of her bowels: if he — the parent substitute — loves her thus, the message seems to be, he really loves her. In my capacity as a psychological censor, I have, in fact, given the play an II Certificate: for infants only — of whatever age group, needless to add.
Even they, however, may want to make up their minds, if any, on two separate questions — and keep them as separate as David Edgar is trying to confuse them. One can be answered without the play: how much therapeutic reality is there behind it all? In Szasz and Laing, the world's two most prominent anti-psychiatric psychiatrists face each other, or refuse to face each other — refusing, likewise, to be described as anti-psychiatrists. Szasz claims that Mary Barnes's cure is her success — which, incidentally, does not seem to be altogether undeserved: I am professionally advised that two of the three pictures shown during the play are marked by unquestionable talent. Nevertheless, Szasz's ultimate challenge would seem to stand: Lock and key fit. The psychiatrist curses and calls it diagnosis, and the patient, especially if he belives it, duly deteriorates. The anti-psychiatrist blesses and calls it discovering genius, and the patient, especially if he believes it, reverently recovers. But how many geniuses can one produce by the method? How many can the market absorb?
The other question is — when is a play a play? The final, strictly empirical answer appears at the end of this review. Meanwhile, more theoretically, we note that when Shakespeare picks Richard H, he provides himself with a framework for his thought and imagination — whereas when David Edgar picks Mary Barnes, he provides himself with a replacement for thought and imagination, inelectably so: the Peter Jenkins and Ted Whitehead will return next week woman is alive and kicking, as are her therapists, and he has to stick to the facts, including all the mental facts, thoughts, imaginings.
In the circumstances, the stage becomes a sheer political platform, the play a propaganda exercise in which your emotions are indeed played upon to make you decide on what should be a rational issue, to be viewed in the light of the facts of the case, the complete facts, and nothing but the facts: the would-be libertarian author is moving, as the crow flies, into 1984 and beyond. That, at the same time, he is contributing to Miss Barnes's increased well-being and, possibly, her increased output, is not in question. Nor is his second-hand propaganda against electro-shock and shocking medication to be despised — but that's negative propaganda, and as such respectable, as was the comparable, incomparable One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. There is all the difference in the free world between 'Don't follow them!' and 'Follow him!'
Masterly performances by Patti Love (downright moving in the last act) and all her colleagues, an alert direction by Peter Farago, and Christopher Morley's incisively naturalistic, two-tiered setting combine to produce a veritable orgy of skill embedding what is, intellectually, the most boring and predictable play I have ever seen in my life.
Well then, is it a play? The all too gentle reader is not yet aware of the extraordinary powers I have been invested with as a psychological censor: I am entitled, not only to keep people out of the theatre, but also to force them into it. And I herewith rule that anybody who disagrees with me, anybody who thinks that this is a play, has to go and see it again.
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